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Friday, December 20, 2013

A Damsel in Distress (RKO, 1937)

I did another one of my TV movie veg-outs this morning,
watching three films in succession on Turner Classic Movies, only one of which
was a bona fide classic: the 1937 Fred
Astaire musical A Damsel in Distress
— and even this was weakened by the casting of the young Joan Fontaine (in only
her second film) as Astaire’s co-star. (He twirls her around in an English
country setting to the strains of George and Ira Gershwin’s beautiful ballad,
“Things Are Looking Up,” in what Arlene Croce called “her one nondance with
Astaire.”) Fortunately the film also cast George Burns as Astaire’s manager and
Gracie Allen as Burns’ secretary — and Burns and Allen proved not only verbally
witty but surprisingly adept on the dance floor (well, maybe not so
surprisingly now that I know one of the jobs Burns had before he met Allen was
as a tap-dance instructor in New York). The film’s best sequence is the big
production number Astaire, Burns and Allen dance in an art deco funhouse, which (praise be) reproduces the famous
“runaround dance” Astaire used to do with his sister Adele (with Gracie Allen
in Adele’s place and adding her own ditziness to it — she gets stuck in the
circular step and keeps doing that throughout the funhouse until Astaire and
Burns come up on either side of her and catch her). While it’s tragic that the
great British dancer Jessie Matthews was not available to be Astaire’s co-star
— the movie was written with both of them in mind and with her it would have
been a masterpiece, but her British producer, Michael Balcon, was too scared to
loan her out to an American studio because he feared that once she got a taste
of the technical precision of American filmmaking she’d never want to go back
home — A Damsel in Distress is
still an entertaining movie, with great Gershwin songs (the film introduced “A
Foggy Day” and “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” both of which became standards),
a fine supporting cast (Reginald Gardiner at his most unctuous, Constance
Collier at her most imperious, Ray Noble at his prissiest and Montagu Love at
his most down-to-earth), acceptable direction by George Stevens and a genuinely
witty (though somewhat contrived) script by P. G. Wodehouse. — 12/17/97

•••••

Charles and I watched the 1937 RKO
musical A Damsel in Distress, the first film
Astaire had made without Ginger Rogers as his co-star since his debut in MGM’s Dancing
Lady (1933). Both Astaire and Rogers wanted to
establish themselves independently of each other. Arlene Croce, in The Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, explains why:
“Personal enmity was not the reason; professional pride was. The same pride
that kept them locked together in a cycle of hits, their teamwork getting
better and better, made each of them more eager to succeed without the other.”
Rogers was also put off because it took so long to make a musical —
particularly the long, arduous rehearsals required to perfect the big dance
numbers (during a break from rehearsing Follow the Fleet Rogers told a reporter, “After this, I’d like to take a
vacation … digging mines!”) — she was losing
out on the big non-musical roles she wanted to other actresses, so in 1937 the
team broke up for a year and a half, during which time Rogers made three films
(Stage Door, Vivacious Lady and Having
Wonderful Time) to Astaire’s one. A Damsel
in Distress was also the second film George and
Ira Gershwin wrote songs for under a two-film contract with RKO after making
the Astaire-Rogers Shall We Dance, though
according to the American Film Institute Catalog George Gershwin had already been dead for two months by the
time Damsel went into production. (He’d
lasted long enough to compose about half the songs needed for Samuel Goldwyn’s The
Goldwyn Follies; Vernon Duke, who’d already
written the hit song “I Can’t Get Started” with Ira Gershwin, stepped in and
finished the score.)

A Damsel in Distress
began life in 1919 as a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, who’s also a credited
screenwriter on the film — though I suspect his credit was simply an
acknowledgment that he provided the original story and the other two credited
writers, Ernest Pagano and S. K. Lauren, actually did the script — and it’s a
pretty typical Wodehouse plot, set (mostly) in an English country estate and
dealing with the class differences between the masters and the servants. The
scummiest character, though, is the head butler, Keggs (Reginald Gardiner), who
has organized a pool among the staff to bed on whom young Lady Alyce
Marshmorton (Joan Fontaine) is going to marry. Keggs has fixed it so he draws
Reggie (Ray Noble), the favored suitor by Alyce’s fearsome Aunt Caroline
(Constance Collier, who was also in Stage Door), sister of her easygoing father Lord John Marshmorton (a
charming character performance by Montagu Love). Albert (Harry Watson), a
prepubescent boy on the service staff, horns in on the raffle by demanding a
ticket for “Mr. X,” which will win if Alyce marries someone who isn’t on Keggs’
list. Albert has inside information that Alyce is sneaking off to London and
dating an American — a man we never meet and who exists only as a character
when Jerry Halliday (Fred Astaire), an American dancer starring in a London
musical, is mistaken for him when Alyce gets into his taxicab while fleeing
from the spying Keggs. Halliday’s press agent, George (George Burns), has built
up an image for him as a dancing Casanova in whose arms (and legs) women are
like putty. Needless to say, Halliday is disgusted by this image and wants to
get away from it, so he decides to take a break from his hit show and hang out
in the English countryside. Albert forges a letter, ostensibly from Alyce,
imploring Jerry to rescue her from her distress at being forced into a marriage
she doesn’t want. Jerry, George and George’s ditzy secretary Gracie (Gracie
Allen), rent a house nearby to Totleigh Castle, ancestral home of the
Marshmortons, and what follows is a predictable series of complications,
including shifting loyalties as Keggs manipulates the raffle, an up-and-down
relationship between Jerry and Alyce, Reggie’s sudden interest in Gracie as the
woman he really loves, and of course a finale in which Jerry and Alyce get
together, as do Gracie and … George. (Well, audiences in 1937 knew full well
that George Burns and Gracie Allen were married for real, so they wouldn’t have
had it any other way!)

Joan Fontaine was RKO’s third choice for the role; their
first choice was the superb British dancer Jessie Matthews, who’d always wanted
to work with Astaire — they were personal friends — and would have been
absolutely wonderful in the part. But Matthews was under contract to Michael
Balcon at Gaumont-British, and he — knowing full well that once she did a film
in Hollywood the chances of getting her back to work in the much less developed
British film industry were slim to none — wouldn’t loan her out. Then RKO
thought of Ruby Keeler, who’d just run out her contract at Warner Bros., and
actually signed her to a one-film contract; she would probably have seemed too
“American” for the role (though she was actually Canadian, which made her at
least technically a subject of the British monarchy), and it’s hard to imagine
her rather jerky style working together with Astaire’s fabled smoothness, but
at least she could dance. Ultimately, RKO
used up their contract with Keeler on a nonmusical film called Mother
Carey’s Chickens which both Ginger Rogers and
Katharine Hepburn turned down, and they put Fontaine in A Damsel in Distress because she was British and, as Croce explains, “as a nondancer
she wouldn’t invite comparisons with Rogers.” You can say that again; aside
from both being young, female and blonde they had almost nothing in common.
Rogers was an accomplished comedienne, while at that time Fontaine acted only
marginally better than she danced; RKO had put her under contract and given her
a buildup but it hadn’t taken, largely because their photographers didn’t seem
able to light her in a way that didn’t make
it look like she had a flashlight bulb at the end of her nose. They dropped her
in 1939 and then Fontaine landed one of the plum roles of the time, the unnamed
heroine in David O. Selznick’s production of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, where she not only had Alfred Hitchcock directing her (and
getting a great performance out of her by keeping her off balance
psychologically to reflect the discontent of the character) but George Barnes
as cinematographer, who made her look far better than anyone else had.

It’s
indicative of RKO’s estimation of the performers’ appeals that they billed
Astaire, Burns and Allen above the title and Fontaine at the top of the
miscellaneous performers’ list below, and they give Fontaine only one number
with her ostensible co-star: a dance in the woods around Totleigh Castle to one
of Gershwin’s most beautiful and haunting songs, “Things Are Looking Up.” (A
Damsel in Distress generated two songs that
became standards, “A Foggy Day” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It”; “Things Are
Looking Up” didn’t, but should have.) Arlene Croce snippily calls this “her one
nondance with Astaire” and adds, “The director, George Stevens, hurls so many
tree trunks between her and the lens that she looks even worse than she is, and
as she and Astaire cross a pond, he cuts away from her in mid-leap, so that she
appears to be taking a header into the water.” Aside from the clunky casting of
Fontaine — who did say in her autobiography
that Astaire and Charles Boyer were her favorite co-stars because when they
made suggestions, they were ideas that would improve the entire film rather
than fatten their parts (her least favorite
co-star, not surprisingly, was Orson Welles) — and the creakier aspects of
Wodehouse’s plot, A Damsel in Distress is a
marvelous film, due largely to the superb comedy of Burns and Allen and their
ability to hold their own on a dance floor with Astaire. The three get to do
two numbers together, “Put Me to the Test” (a dance with whiskbrooms in the
living room of the cottage Jerry has rented to be near Alyce, set to a song for
which Ira Gershwin wrote a lyric that wasn’t used here, but was seven years later in the Rita Hayworth-Gene Kelly musical Cover
Girl to a new melody by Jerome Kern) and “Stiff
Upper Lip,” an elaborate production number choreographed by Astaire’s
assistant, Hermes Pan, set in a fun house full of distorting mirrors, slides,
revolving barrels and two giant turntables, rotating in opposite directions, on
which Astaire and Gracie Allen do the trademark dance he had done in virtually
all his stage shows with his sister Adele. Variously called the “nut dance,” the
“runaround dance” and the “oompah trot,” it’s a simple walking step set to a
2/4 march on which the band just vamped for as long as Fred and Adele Astaire
felt like keeping it going. This had been a major part of Fred Astaire’s stage
act but he hadn’t done it in a film until this one because he hadn’t thought
Ginger Rogers was right for it.

A Damsel in Distress was a commercial flop, and the reviewers at the time savaged it
— the general tenor of the critics was, “Fred, get thee back to Ginger — if
she’ll still have you!” — and one aches at the thought of what this film could
have been with a fabulous dancer like Jessie Matthews in the female lead
instead of Joan Fontaine — but it’s still a great movie, powered by Gershwin’s
great songs, Astaire’s performances of them (particularly the final “Nice Work
If You Can Get It” number, a solo for Astaire amidst a large and heavily
equipped drum set — Astaire was a fully professional musician on both piano and
drums, and he played drums again in Easter Parade and Daddy Longlegs) and the
almost surreal humor of Burns and Allen. Though they anticipated Lucille Ball
and Desi Arnaz in the ditzy-wife-drives-exasperated-husband-almost-insane genre (and of course both were couples off-screen as well!), whereas
Lucy got her laughs mostly from slapstick Burns and Allen were dialogue
comedians, and many of Allen’s lines here make you laugh and then leave you scratching your head at the sheer bizarreness of them
— which is also how the characters in the film react to them; at times Gracie
will toss off a line, the people in the movie will laugh, and so will you, then
as the oddness of what she just said registers the people in the movie,
including sometimes Gracie herself, will scratch their heads and whine, “I
don’t get it.” — 12/20/13